


Bird Song

by callunavulgari



Series: Dark Month Collection [78]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: 31 Days Of Halloween, Dreams, Gen, M/M, Minor Henry Cheng/Richard Gansey III/Blue Sargent, Wings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-22
Updated: 2019-10-22
Packaged: 2020-12-28 00:01:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21127433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/callunavulgari
Summary: On a dreary Sunday in early January, Ronan dreams himself a pair of wings.





	Bird Song

**Author's Note:**

> Day 20 of October. Posted on the 21st, because I was really tired and honestly just sick of everything yesterday. This was supposed to be at least 3k longer and include _all_ of the prompts, but like I said, I was just not having a great day yesterday. So this is not creepy or sexy or Halloween-themed, with the exception being that growing oneself a pair of wings is really kind of odd.
> 
> Prompts were: a stacked deck: tarot cards, darkness, whisper, bite, fight fire with fire, wings, and roasted. I wish I'd been able to include the Calla scene.

On a dreary Sunday in early January, Ronan dreams himself a pair of wings. The first thing that he notices upon waking is the weight. It’s like having a heavy blanket draped over his shoulders, one of those fancy weighted ones that are supposedly good for anxiety or whatever. The second thing that he notices, his brain still coming back to life, is that they’re _itchy_, at the very base, where they’ve unfurled from his shoulderblades like a new pair of arms.

He blinks sleepily in the soft light, and when he reaches back to scratch them, feels the brush of downy feathers. He blinks in confusion, and sits up, the weight of the blanket that isn't really a blanket coming with him. His muscles, the ones bunched just below his shoulders, are tight and cramped.

Staggering out of the bed is difficult, because his relationship with gravity and his own body has just shifted, tilting on its axis.

The mirror on his dresser is dark, because the _room_ is dark, only the faintest hint of dawn light seeping in through the blinds. But even in the darkness, Ronan can make out the shape of them. He reaches back, scratches at the place where skin meets new bone, and finds where they meet is still crusty with dried blood.

He flips on a light, and stares.

They’re raven wings, the exact shade and texture of Chainsaw’s, multiplied to a hundred times their size. He strains, twitching his shoulderblades, and sees the wings twitch too.

“Well, fuck,” he breathes, and slams the light off.

Over the next few days, he spends a lot of time dreaming. He pops melatonin like it’s candy, and when that doesn’t work, finds an old prescription bottle of his dad’s sleeping pills. They’re not the shit Kavinsky gave him a couple years ago, doesn’t knock him out like he’s been unceremoniously clubbed in the head, but they do leave him in a strange, fog-like state until sleep claims him like something inevitable.

He dreams up more birds. A chest of drawers. Ivory feathers that slice into the meat of his thumb like a blade. A necklace he thinks might have been his mother’s once. But he does not dream the wings away.

When he wakes up on the third day, it’s to the sinking realization that they're not going away.

He calls Blue.

When she picks up the line, there’s a strange squawking noise in the background, like someone incredibly affronted that she’s choosing that moment to pick up the phone. It doesn’t sound like Gansey, but a moment later there’s a soft murmur that’s a little more his speed.

“Sargent?” he asks, because she hasn’t said anything.

“Yes, Ronan?” she says, placidly, like she’s been waiting for _him_ to speak. She’s such a little shit. He’s so fucking proud.

“Where are you, right now?”

“Not sure,” she muses, and he can hear the line prickle with static as she moves around. “Hey, where are we?”

“Not getting anywhere fast, that’s where,” a voice that sounds like Cheng’s grumbles, and then there’s a fleshy sound, and a pained grunt.

“Washington,” says Gansey, clear as a bell.

Blue hums. “Washington.”

“Yeah, I heard.” He grimaces. There is no way that he’s going to ask them to end their roadtrip early just to come gawk at his wings. “All right, thanks for your help.”

“Wait!” Blue hisses. Ronan waits. “I know you didn’t call just to check in on us. The last time you texted was three months ago and it was just a picture of a sign at the grocery store.”

Ronan gnaws on his lip. That sounded about right.

Her voice softens. “What’s wrong, Ronan?”

Fuck it.

“All right, hang on,” he says, and pushes himself out of bed.

The room is still dark, and he doesn’t actually know what time of day it is, so he fumbles along the wall until he hits a light switch. Then he turns his back to the mirror, trying to spread his wings a little so she can tell they aren’t some leftover Halloween prop, and holds his phone above his head. Getting the picture takes a bit of trying. He isn’t well versed in selfies, and with the wings, the angles are all fucking weird.

When he’s done, he sends it to Blue.

“There,” he says, collapsing onto the bed again. He starts picking at one of his feathers, one of the longer ones- flight feathers? He doesn’t know shit about birds. “Coming your way.”

There’s a couple moments of silence, and a beep, then Blue’s, “Oh, _wow_.”

Somewhere behind her, two voices chorus, “What?”

“Oh my gosh, Ronan,” she breathes, and over the line, Ronan can hear Gansey pushing towards her, then a startled breath.

“What did you _do_?” Gansey asks, sounding somewhere between awed and horrified.

“What is it?” Cheng asks. Horrifyingly, Ronan thinks he can pick out a distinct jangling sound, then the scrape of metal sliding on metal. It sounds, horrifyingly, like _handcuffs_. 

Presumably, they show him, because there’s another long pause before- “_Holy shit_.”

“Seriously,” Blue says, once the phone’s shifted back to her. “What the hell_ did_ you do?”

Ronan snorts. “What else. I had a dream.”

She hisses a little, then asks, “Have you shown Adam yet?”

Ronan shrinks in on himself, the wings actually managing to wrap around him, like they’re trying to give him a hug. He bats at them. “He’s got his orientation this week. I don’t want to bug him.”

Blue snorts. “Ronan, you grew yourself a pair of wings. Pretty sure he’d be okay with you calling him about this. What about Opal?”

“With Adam,” he tells her, reluctantly. She’d wanted to go, and for whatever reason, Adam was okay with his boyfriend's dream daughter tagging along with him.

“Ronan,” Blue says. “Call them.”

And then she hangs up on him, the harpy.

He doesn’t call them. Instead, he putters around the house, waiting for them to get back. It’s just another three days, and during that time, he runs some tests.

The first test is spreading the wings fully. This is difficult at first, because his muscles fight him the whole way, twitching and cramping and generally throwing a fucking fit. Expected, really. He’s gone his whole life not having gigantic appendages attached to his back. His muscles can’t be blamed for not wanting to move something that shouldn’t exist.

The first time he tries, it takes hours, coaxing the wings to twitch and jerk before he has to take a breath and slap a heating pad on his shoulders for a while. But eventually, he manages it, and then every time after is easier.

The second test is seeing if he can actually flap them. For some reason, this isn’t half so hard as getting them extended was.

The third test is the impossible one. Seeing if he can fly.

It shouldn’t work. Dreaming the wings didn’t do anything else. It didn’t give him tail feathers or hollow out his bones to make him lighter, and while the wings themselves are huge - six feet each fully extended, he’d gotten a tape measure - they would have to be twice that size to hold a human being in the air for a decent stretch of time.

But for some reason, it_ does_ work.

Dreams are impossible things, and he’s given up on trying to figure out why some dream objects follow the rules of the real world and others snub them completely.

He practices each day, jumping off of the barn, the house, the trees, and by the time he hears Adam’s car rumbling down the lane, he’s gotten good at it. The fear of never being able to go out in public again has taken a backburner to the absolute joy he gets from flying. It’s a thrill unlike anything he’s ever experienced - better than the smell of burning rubber and the clutch gripped tight in his fingers, better than the raw red of scraped knuckles after a good fight. In some ways, it’s even better than sex.

So he surprises them, dropping out of the trees above them while Adam is helping Opal out of the car, flinging his wings out to catch him right as he's about to hit the ground and landing lightly on the soft earth a couple paces to the left.

Adam stares at him, open mouthed. Opal just raises a tiny eyebrow and reaches out to touch a wing. She squints at him, then shrugs. “I thought they’d be sharp.”

“What did you _do_?” Adam breathes, and Ronan laughs, exhilarated.

“I had a dream.”


End file.
